For many years, I took a break from reading theory, mainly literary theory. What bothered me about theory as it applied to literature and culture was that it lost (or never cared to find) a focus on the intrinsic merits, principally, aesthetic, as well as explore intertextual and literary biographical aspects of literary texts. Instead, the text all too often became a means to end, a stepping stone to demonstrate the workings of power (Foucault), logocentrism (Derrida), capitalism (Jameson). I felt I was in the presence of secular priest-academics, hell-bent on finding social truths, trampling rough-shod otherwise on literary history and value and aesthetics. But they weren't out in the field fighting and struggling and taking risks for social justice.If I want to be informed about politics, why not just read a newspaper or the work of political scientist or journalist or sociologist? Why a literary theorist? Reading theory was heady, inspiring for me at times, but something that indulged in for too long, too much of it began to seem arid and empty to me. Thus, I would liken reading too much theory to taking cocaine: it was a drug that took you into an abstract world divorced from the material, everyday world by virtue of the scintillating play of ideas, deft application of theory, apt choice of words, virtuouso handling of syntax, head-spinning organization of ideas. And it all seemed so meaningful, but at the same time it was so, so far divorced from reality.
The paradigmatic figure in the world of Anglo-literary theory had become the prolific, neo-Marxist Frederic Jameson with whom I became most familiar. He is most notable for his paragraph long sentences and amazing facility at handling ideas and concepts like silly-putty, maneuvering them with formidable erudition and dexterity, much like Sartre. Exploitation, alienation, destruction wrought by capitalism--these are some of Jameson's underlying targets. At times, I was engaged to be sure by what I read,. But where did reading Jameson get me?! If political injustice is something I want to read about, I'd rather read the account of a historian, a political activist, or about an educator, who is on the front lines fighting for social justice. Rather than read a recondite literary theorist, I'd settle for reading a muckracking writer or journalist.
I was wary of reading Zizek who was a self-proclaimed follower of Jacques Lacan, a follower of Freud. Lacan takes Freudian ideas and puts them into neat semiotic formulas. He writes in an opaque, gnomic, elliptical style in which the meaning isn't readily evident. And he shares Freud's heavy handed moralism and sexism, and is all to ready find perversion and deviance in any sexual expression that doesn't conform to some middle class norm from the Victorian era. But Zizek uses Lacan in quite interesting ways that to me actually seem to make sense.
Zizek is a theorist like Jameson, but with a few twists, like, a morbid, zany sense of humor, a gadfly's proclivity for provocative overstatement and trenchant wit, a liking for and frequent allusion to popular film and fiction, and on occasion, he speaks bluntly, forcibly, and quite effectively, eschewing qualifications and provisos. All these qualities have made him a popular academic, and if you watch him on youtube, you can see just how engaging and entertaining he is compared to most other academics.
My main difficulty with In Defense of Lost Causes were the sections and chapters that Zizek devoted to trying to salvage some meaning and value from mostly recent social revolutions (the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese). I found myself grimacing at times as he wrote about Stalin's violent experiments in collective farming and industrialization, and the purges of the party leadership itself. Just how much instructive material can be gleaned from these disasters for the sake of future revolutions? Just how much a failure, just what cost of human lives is needed to realize that it need not be repeated yet again? Even if I was given pause to reconsider just how, according to Zizek, the road to utopia or rather hell is paved with good intentions, from which we can indeed learn when the attempt or rather revolutionary fervor explodes, unexpectedly, again on the world stage, the tone in which he does so, treating human casulties as just seeming numbers cannot but seem callous. Perhaps this is calculated provocation: we are too accustomed to dismiss out of hand the brutal, inhumane excesses of communism. While we do indeed tend to overlook the excesses of capitalism, as Zizek correctly, avers, as a matter of course, regarding them as the objective, inevitable consequence of history, that is no reason to adopt such an attitude to the excesses of communism.
The cover of Zizek's book features a rendering, a color drawing of a guillotine blade, but one that has been conceptually pulled out of its context from the larger wooden structure of which it is a part, as well as the scene in which it was deployed--a bloody spectacle of public execution. So, too, isn't Zizek's writing in his book about revolutionary violence largely taking place in a scene apart and distant from its agents and victims? Or is the focus not so much on the human agents involved--after all they are ultimately instruments of historical forces they embody and deploy, but which they cannot quite control according to their plans--but rather on the mechanisms, the inner laws that seem to determine the course that violent change and upheaval tends to take? That does seem like a worthwhile topic to investigate, not adopt a dismissive formula, as Zizek observes, of the revolution turns against itself, consumes itself. What else may we learn from the socio-psychological factors that determine this self-destructive turn. That seems a worthwhile investigation, but the tone in which Zizek conducts it, tossing in a devil-may-care humor seems to me, on more than a few occasions, excessive and inappropriate. For my sensibility there is too much mordant, black humor in the aftermath of social revolutions gone wrong with millions of casualties.
One wonders just how many readers take Zizek for his word, and even if they do, what access do they have to power? This talk of revolutionary embrace and reconsideration seems to me quixotic and misplaced. In the absence of relevance and reverberation in the larger world, in the relatively quiet halls of academia and bookstores, what other way is there to create a stir, then to provoke your audience, to make outrageous claims? Terry Eagleton in his review of Zizek's Drense in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) aptly likened Zizek's book as more interesting for its naves, than its halls.
When ZIzek is not making politically provocative overstatements, I read him with interest, for, informed as he is by philosophy, theory, psychology, linguistics, he has original, compelling things to say about political developments. Moreover, he applies abstruse theory to phenomenon unfolding today in a persuasive, readily understood manner.
to be continued
